Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2000/04/24/a_victory_for_truth.php
Monday, April 24, 2000
In a decision last week, a British court rejected a libel suit by American historian David Irving against an American academic critic of his work, Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University. There were many levels of importance in this suit.
In its largest sense, it involved the duty of historians to approach as closely as possible to historical fact—to guard 'memory' as a vital part of our history of who we are.
This may come as news to the reader here, but a recent and influential theory of the writing of history holds that there is no such thing as history. There are only various 'narratives' about historical events. That is, a history of the wars between Rome and Carthage would be very different if told from the point of view of Hannibal as against that of Scipio Africanus. Different events would be stressed, different meanings assessed.
Down this road, skepticism begins to erode the possibility of writing history at all. One 'narrative' is as good as another.
Yet, after all, when you get serious, no one really doubts that Rome defeated and destroyed Carthage, that Cornwalis surrendered at Yorktown, or that Japan surrendered on the deck of the battleship Missouri in 1945. There are establishable facts. History does not dissolve into a fog of skepticism.
Into all of this now entered David Irving, whom Professor Lipstadt denounced in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. She called Irving a dangerous manipulator and shoddy historian who manipulated history to downplay the slaughter of European Jews and Hitler's role in it.
Irving sued for libel, alleging that Lipstadt had damaged his career and misrepresented him as an historian.
He had a much better chance of winning under British libel law than under American. Irving is undoubtedly a public figure, and, under the relevant Supreme Court New York Times decision, a public figure must demonstrate 'malice' to win a libel suit. In other words, it is almost impossible for a public figure to win such a suit.
Under British law, the burden was on Lipstadt to provide proof for her allegation that Irving is a dangerous Holocaust denier. Irving undoubtedly thought, correctly, that British law favored his suit. He could plead mistakes in his research, possible misinterpretations, and so on.
It is good that he lost, for the sake of writing history at all. Judge Charles Gray ruled that Irving had no case, that his writing of history has been 'perverse and egregious,' and that he had 'persistently misrepresented and manipulated evidence.' He concluded that Irving is an 'active Holocaust denier.'
Under British law, the individual who initiates a libel suit and loses owes the legal costs to the defendant. Mr. Irving owes Professor Lipstadt around $3 million.
There is an element of tragedy here, though not much. Stanford Professor Gordon Craig has written that Irving is an excellent researcher, has uncovered new material about the Nazi era, and found new sources. He has shed important new light on the period.
And, in my opinion, Irving is not quite a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust minimizer—and here he has been driven into fantasy land.
The Nazi campaign to eliminate European Jewry is about as well documented as anything in history. The Nazi bureaucracy kept meticulous records. There is no responsible figure as to murdered Jews lower than four and a half million. The conventional figure is six million, probably closer to the truth. The bureaucracy could not keep up with the vast numbers consigned to mass graves as the German army swept into Russia and the death squads followed.
Irving has committed various extravagances, such as that the gas chambers were post-war constructions, that no cyanide was found in their bricks, or that the victims actually died of typhus.
And, he holds, that whatever happened was not Hitler's fault. In his biography of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Irving holds Goebbels responsible for the murder campaign, conceding at least that there was a murder campaign. He makes much of the fact that no documentary evidence connects Hitler himself with the campaign against the Jews.
This is all fantastic. The campaign against the Jews was part of a Hitler project to make of Germany a 'Volksgemeinschaft,' a nation on the model of an extended family united by blood. When Heinrich Himmler announced the campaign to Nazi higher-ups at the famous meeting in Wansee, a Berlin suburb, very early in the war, no one was in doubt about the program. The architect Albert Speer, who attended, got away with explaining that he often left the meeting and did not grasp its importance.
That Himmler, head of the SS, could have held such a meeting without Hitler's approval is inconceivable.
To be sure, the Nazi hierarchy usually communicated in euphemisms. German Jews, and, as time went on, other Jews from occupied countries, were 'relocated' to 'the East.'
Hitler himself did order that Jews in the East were to be treated as guerilla enemy fighters—that is to say, shot. All of this is documented photographically and by copious testimony.
And it amounted to an extraordinary moral black-hole in twentieth century history, not least because it happened in Germany, in the heart of civilized Europe, and so was not like something off somewhere on the Russian steps or around the Yangtze.
So what is going on here?
There is a crank element in democratic culture, people who enjoy 'special knowledge,' theories opposed to ordinary thought and not accessible to the mainstream—that, for example, someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays, or that history is Masonic conspiracy, or that Franklin Roosevelt plotted Pearl Harbor.
If you wrote a book to the effect that Lincoln was poisoned by Secretary Stanton rather than shot in Ford's Theater, you would sell copies.
The decision of the British court was cleansing, and a service to honest history writing.